It's that parenting is exhausting.
I could do physical labor for hours. Code straight for hours.
But when I have to look after the 2 kids for 3 hours solo I'm totally exhausted. And I don't mean sit them in front of a TV - but actually try and feed them, change diapers, clean up after their messes, keep them entertained...
Weekends are suddenly way more exhausting than weekdays.
And then that compounds over weeks.
It's totally exhausting. The modern model is totally unsustainable/not scalable, but I'm not sure what the alternative should be.
I do not find parenting that difficult because I parent differently.
The alternative: Teach them to entertain themselves. They clean up their own messes. I have the kiddos do tasks with me. Babies are easy enough, toddlers need limited stuff to do as it is all about novelty. Kids 5+ can learn to entertain themselves with their talents, siblings, neighbors.
It's by design. Kids don't produce capital for the elites. We peasants aren't supposed to have kids, just waste away grinding so that those in power can accumulate more power, because they can pay others and have as many kids as they want, but we from the middle class will struggle with one or two.
A village where trusted neighbors and family members and a chain of kids in increasing ages can help look after each other.
1) Though they are comparing parents specifically, without the baseline of what the hunter-gatherer groups sleep was like without children, are they comparing hunter-gatherer group to industrialized people? Or are they comparing parenting?
50% of people rate their sleep as an F, and another 21% a D grade [1]. That feels likely everyone is failing at sleep, not just parents.
2) specifically in mothers, as motherhood has shifted later in life, the early years with young children are now often overlapping with perimenopause, so mothers are hit with the double whammy of sleep disruption. I blogged about this a few months ago [2]
The study is still mostly focused on the antiquated idea that sleep duration is a predictor of sleep quality. The latest research shows sleep regularity is a better predictor of morbidity than sleep duration. I wrote about hot the Neural Function of Sleep dictates this [3]. Studies in shift workers (I can never find the link) shows regularity trumps duration for both subjective sleepiness and cognitive performance.
The article does mention the increase in prolactin during breastfeeding, but the tiredness of parenting doesn't only last through the first year (apparently the average of breastfeeding in Australia is 6 months). The hunter-gatherer societies I'm sure breastfeed for longer periods.
I work in neurotech/sleeptech as the co-founder of affectablesleep.com and we have a keen focus on parents of young children and specifically enhancing the Neural Function of Sleep, not sleep duration which everyone obsesses over [4].
[1] https://www.thensf.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/NSF_SIA_20...
[2] https://blog.affectablesleep.com/p/when-childrearing-meets-m...
[3] https://blog.affectablesleep.com/p/the-hidden-work-of-sleep-...
[4] https://blog.affectablesleep.com/p/try-telling-new-parents-t...
This doesn't really mean anything for comparing parents with non-parents, since it's self-reported so "failing" could mean "missing several hours of needed sleep each night" to one person and "failing to hit higher-than-needed sleep target twice a week" to another.
How did get so lucky?
Until the advent of electricity, when it was nighttime, it was mostly pitch black dark, and there was nothing you can really do except go to sleep. These days you're up a lot longer and there are more distractions like work and social media to keep you up well into the night. If you ever go camping with no cell phone signal, you'll go to sleep much earlier as well and get a lot more sleep than modern living.
Yeah but how many times were they woken up in the night?
With a baby you might still get 8 hours total but you’re woken up 4 times a night which makes that sleep way less effective.
"It's not that modern parents are waking up more often. Work by Samson and others has found that people in hunter-gatherer societies usually wake more frequently through the night than we do."
But I think there's a difference between waking up at night because your baby is crying, calming them down, going back to sleep, etc etc. when you have a 9-to-5 job, versus if you're a hunter-gatherer.
In compensation I noticed they nap frequently in the day time, often in the hottest part of the day when it's unpleasant to work.
It put my own sleep issues in perspective, I realized I had been a little too precious about it and I can indeed do fine on more fractured sleep. Often I form a judgment in the morning about my sleep and if I feel bad about it, I carry that through the day. I'm more convinced now it's a psychosomatic thing, I'm convincing myself I should be tired! So I try not to do that now and think of the people out here who live every day like this.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieva...
When I work from home and have a bad night, a 20-30 minute power nap during the day does wonders.
Clearly my anecdotes do not apply to the rest of globe, just my observation.
But most people cannot have those things in modern Euromerican nations
> most people cannot
I dont know if "cannot" is the right verb here. I bet if you asked enough euromericans if they'd choose to live with extended family the answer would be "only in extreme and deprived circumstances".
Isn't a common excuse for not having children that couples can't afford their own home?
Another reason to not have kids.
> Our ancestors may have simply had less practical need to sleep deeply in one continuous stretch. "They would not have had the pressure of having to work a nine-to-five or an eight-to-five job that required them to get a certain amount of sleep during the night to be able to function the next day and to function safely," Ball says. "They weren't driving cars. They weren't operating heavy machinery. The kinds of things that matter to us just simply wouldn't have been issues."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_Fut...
Another reason to not have kids.
I was working nights before my kiddo came along, and I cant tell whether it was working in another timezone that ruined my sleep or he did. Either way, its not likely to ever come back.
I'll trade 15 minutes of sleep for a lifetime of joy, thank you :)
Not sure where are those lucky ones, but I've met half a dozen parents that became literal zombies during the first years because of a lack of sleep. From what they've reported, 2 hours is a lucky night. It does get better later on, after 2(!) years.
So yea I imagine that'll turn you into a zombie.
They also said after a year they got a tip about a chiropractor (IIRC), went there and after 5 minutes the colic was gone. A real mix of emotions they said...